The debate on rigor-relevance in information systems research have risen important questions for establishment of IS discipline. Many scholars within IS discipline have been concerned about the nature of and the future of the discipline. Izak Benbasat and Bob Zmud have provided some notable opinions on the "identity crisis" we believe faces IS discipline. Their papers had a great influence on the argument about IS discipline whether for better or for worse. Then, by a critical survey mainly in their paper, this paper explores a road of establishing IS research as a discipline.

Although many studies have investigated relationships between Information Communication Technologies (ICT) and organizations, few studies have conducted international comparisons on the theme, and even fewer have focused on national culture in their analytical framework. This research clarifies the role national culture plays in shaping the emergent relationship between ICT and the organizations. I review in this article a number of previous studies on this theme, comparative studies between Japanese and British firms in particular National culture has been less fully examined in previous studies on ICT and organization, but my analysis suggests the necessity of a detailed examination of the concept in a cross-national comparisons.

In this paper, the author considers a preliminary overview for information management studies in the future, in particular, through that we look back on the question: "is information management an independent discipline." Therefore, this paper is organized as follows. First, I will review about the "reference discipline" for a discussion of P. G. W. Keen (1989) that was the beginning of the discussion. Next, I will review the impact of Keen (1980). At this time, I was divided into the mainstream (what to study) and the leading stream (how to study). Then, I will overview of the controversy "identity crisis" over the IT artifact. Finally, I describe the personal opinion about the challenges of the future.

Organizational development (OD) recently has focused on the invention of methods based on practical perspectives rather than academic ones. This movement has resulted in increased "development of OD." While this attention is mostly positive, it has led to a loss of clear identity for OD. Thus we call this phenomenon gritting refined gold. We argue the identity of OD by considering developmental practices, both empirically and theoretically. This study shows that OD has been consistent in its principle of development and has hold its traditional logic which had humanistic values at the center of interventions.

In recent information systems research, design science that puts importance on practical relevance attracts many scholars' attention. Some IS researchers expect design science to overcome the positivist approach that lost practical relevance in exchange for scientific rigor. Does dismissing positivism, however, truly make design science more relevant? Even if IS researchers would broaden their methods such as compensatory multi-method or multilevel analysis, they are still under traditional philosophy of science as usual. This paper shows how rigorous scientific methods of positivism can ensure scientific relevance to intervention through an examination of behavioral science and action science. The latter has established by Chris Argyris as the new philosophy of science aimed at intervention into practice. In particular, three fundamental methods of positivism are examined: description, causal explanation, and hypothesis testing.

Information management researchers have tried to find their own academic identity, especially in terms of the interdisciplinarity, which is central to management theory. Our discussion proposes four future directions. First, information management research should aim to construct its own academic identity by means of conducting "research with practice", and keeping away from scientism. Second, we should conceptualize technology, organization and information based on that they are epistemologically objective and construct our living worlds variously. Third, we should insist on IT determinism, that is, our academic identity belongs to the morality which IT concept mixed by information and technology has, rather than to materiality per se. Fourth, we should give serious consideration to the fact that researchers could never escape from intervening various practices through analysis.

Japan has launched the e-Japan Strategy in early 2001, and has past almost for 13 years since the first priority policy program was announced by the IT Strategy Headquarters of Cabinet Secretariat. However, the progress is not outstanding, although the program has been frequently enhanced and revised to accelerate and boost the strategy. Among others, the e-Government policy is failed in the obvious enhancements of governmental services the people essentially anticipated. In this paper, I summarize the trails of e-Japan Strategy, particularly focused on the e-Government policy area. Then, I mention the three fundamental issues, evolution of business model, 5-layer Enterprise Architecture and shared object library, which are required to lead the e-Government policy to the successful direction.

Open Government is now a popular political movement in the world since Obama administration announced "Open Government Initiative". We examine how the open government and it's affiliation, open data policy are spreading world-wide. Then we compare the open government and open data policy. We propose the concept of Open Governance which expands open government in two ways. First, open governance changes positions of citizens to be a real master in the public sphere, traditionally government has been and still now government behaves as a lord. Second, it includes legislative branch in the government as well as administrative branch. And we show a maturity model for open governance. In both open government and open governance system, digital technology including Internet and Social media plays a vital infrastructural role.

The framework of this paper is as follows: We first introduce the framework of analysis of this comparative study; We then examine the environment, which has an impact on e-Government of Japan and Korea, especially the local administration system and the political and economic system; We perform a comparative study of Japan and Korea on IT strategy, goal, implementation system, IT infrastructure, application, business process reengineering, information security; Finally, we conclude with a study on the direction of Japanese e-Government.

Information security has been considered to be a technique, but recently, information security management has become important. Local governments have to be performed as well as the conventional office counters, also provide information using web site. So, ensuring information security has become important. However, the information security of the municipality is not sufficient, therefore, incident has revealed. The "infallibility", difficulty of financial circumstances, and indifference of the governor and senior managements are in its failure.